i
When We Look Up

When we look up
each from his being
       Robert Duncan

He had not looked,
pitiful man whom none

pity, whom all
must pity if they look

into their own face (given
only bu glass, steel, water

barely known) all
who look up

to see—how many
faces?      How many

seen in a lifetime? (Not those
that flash by, but those

into which the gaze wanders
and is lost

and returns to tell
Here is a mystery,

a person, an
other, an I?

Count them.
Who are five million?

‘I was used from the nursery
to obedience

all my life…
Corpselike

obedience…’ Yellow
calmed him later—

‘a charming picture’
yellow of autumn leaves in

Wienerwald, a little
railroad station
nineteen-o-eight, Lemburg,

yellow sun
on the stepmother’s teatable

Franz Joseph’s beard
blessing his little ones.

It was the yellow
of the stars too,

stars that marked
those in whose faces

you had not
looked. ‘They were cast out

as if they were
some animals, some beasts.’

“and what would disobedience
have brought me? And

whom would it have served?’
‘I did not let my thoughts

dwell on this—I had
seen it and that was

enough.’ (The words
‘slur into a harsh babble’)

‘A spring of blood
gushed from the earth.’
Miracle

unsung. I see
a spring of blood
gush from the earth—

Earth cannot swallow
so much at once

a fountain
rushes towards the sky

unrecognized
a sign—.

Pity this man who saw it
whose obedience continued—

he, you, I, which shall I say?
He stands

isolate in a bulletproof
witness-stand of glass,

a cage, where we may view
ourselves, an apparition

telling us something he
does not know: we are members

one of another.

ii
The Peachtree

The Danube orchards
are full of fruit
but in the city one tree
haunts a boy’s dreams

a tree in a villa garden
the Devil’s garden
a peach tree

and of its fruit one peach
calls to him

he sees it yellow and ripe
the vivid blood
bright in its round cheek

Next day he knows
he cannot withstand deer
it is no common fruit

it holds some secret
it speaks to the yellow star within him

he scales the wall
enters the garden of death
takes the peach
and death pounces

mister death who rushes out
from his villa
mister death who loves yellow

who wanted that yellow peach
for himself
mister death who signs papers
then eats

telegraphs simply: Shoot them
then eats
mister death who orders
more transports
then eats

he would have enjoyed
the sweetest of all the peaches on his tree
with sour-cream
with brandy

Son of David
’s blood, vivid red
and trampled juice
yellow and sweet
flow together beneath the tree

there is more blood than sweet juice
always more blood—mister
death goes indoors
exhausted

Note: This poem is based on the earliest mention, during the trial, of this incident.
In a later statement it was said that the fruit was cherries, that the boy was already
in the garden, doing forced labor, when he was accused of taking the fruit, and that
Eichmann killed him in a tool shed, not beneath the tree. The poem is therefore not 
to be taken as a report of what happened but of what I envisioned. D.L.

iii 
Crystal Night

From blacked-out streets
     (wide avenues swept by curfew,
     alleyways, veins
     of dark within dark)

from houses whose walls
     had for a long time known
the tense stretch of skin over bone
as their brick or stone listened—

                 The scream!
The awaited scream rises,
the shattering
of glass and the cracking
of bone

a polar tumult as when
black ice booms, knives
of ice and glass
splitting and splintering the silence into
innumerable screaming needles of
yes, now it is upon us, the jackboots
are running in spurts of
sudden blood-light through the
broken temples

the veils
ar rent in twain
terror has a white sound
every scream
of fear is a white needle freezing the eyes
the floodlights of their trucks throw
jets of white, their shouts
cleave the wholeness of darkness into
sectors of transparent white-clouded pantomime
where all that was awaited
is happening, it is Crystal Night

it is Crystal Night
these spikes which are not
pitched in the range of common hearing
whistle through time

smashing the windows of sleep and dream
smashing the windows of history
a witness scattering
in hailstones
each a mirror 
for man’s eyes.